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Like most children, I wanted a pet. Like most parents, mine said no. But I was a very determined six year old. I wanted a pet.I went through a series of pigeons,crows,cockroaches,lizards and mice, that I tried to raise on our terrace or in our attic. But, the insensitive creatures had no finer feelings; actually, had no feelings at all. They turned around and abandoned me the minute they had their bellies full. They did not love me. My little heart broke. I wandered about the house with a long face and bleary eyes. My mother made me swallow many pills and drink all sorts of bitter syrups to get rid of the stubborn cold that made me sniffle all the time and made my eyes red and bloated. I wasn't going to tell her that I had looked love in the eye and it had been shot down , that my heart lay scattered in a million pieces around the house. My dad bought me a plastic doll to make me less cranky, I wanted a live doll, and No, my baby brother did not count. He was bald and red and bawl…

MR. SPIDERLong , long ago in a deep, dark and tangled forest, there lived a teensie green spider. It glittered like an emerald and was the king of all its kind. He was the head of the jungle routes. He designed all the pathways and sideways and roped them off for safety with his platoon of spids. They made trains ensconced in shiny webs -- upwards, downwards and crossways -- all across the jungle. The careful construction of Mr. Spider marked out the designated official routes through the wide woods. If the animals were not careful they could wander off the path in the dark, unknown of the vast jungle and become the easy, terrified prey of the beasts and demons that dwelt there, in the quiet, with bright , yellow torch eyes that glowed like fog lights on deserted highways. All the little animals that lived the the wooded clearing at the middle were grateful to Mr. Spider and constantly plied him with their exigous gifts to try to pay back for the sense of security he created for the…

My strictly othrodox , conservative South Indian brahmin family had established a very strict code of conduct and etiquette at home, and my brother and I buckled under the heavy weight of supposed upright and moral behaviour.And morality did not limit itself to - no lying to grown ups, no cheating on tests, no wearing of skirts that showed the knee, no leaving the collar button open... the list goes on, but what is of particular interest to this story is that for my parents morality included not eating dead animals,birds, fishes... or their eggs.Having been brought up on horror stories of butchers and savage ripping of meat and drinking of blood (imaginative excesses run in the family). Vegetarianism became our religion.Whenever our heathen neighbours cooked rich animals in dripping grease ; my poor mother used to vomit and get sick and take to the bed with a headache . The peculiar smell of meat had attached itself to the smell of my mother's vomit in my head.I grew up and went …

There was once a girl .She was diagnosed with cancer. She had been a sunny girl with a head full of hazel hair. She went to school and worked hard on her lessons. She wanted to be a scientist when she grew up. Her parents had bought her a Junior Chemistry set for her sixth birthday. She played with it every day after school and made a lot of bangs and booms and plumes of colourful smoke. Her mother smiled to herself and felt very proud of her clever daughter. When she turned seventeen, she caught a cold and went about the house coughing and coughing, till her parents coerced her to see a doctor. The doctor listened to her heart, pressed her wrist and drew her blood.And one clear,Wednesday morning called them into his office and annouced that that the girl had throat cancer , and would live no more than four months.The family went home in shock and dismay. The girl climbed up the stairs to her room and sat down on her fluffy bed with her lesson books strewn on them. She looked about i…

PublicFriendsFriends except acquaintancesOnly MeCustomClose FriendsState Bank of IndiaSee all lists...Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh AreaCambridge University PressNaval Public SchoolUniversity of HyderabadHyderabad Central UniversityVisakha Valley SchoolAcquaintancesGo Back Phora the elephant walked slowly down the road . R-U-M-B-L-E R-U-M-B-L-E , he went. " Helloooo Mr.Carpenter! How are you ?""Fine fine Phorie. Good to see you. Where are you going? "" I'm off to Mr.Tailor's . He will have a banana for me. He always does." Phora replied with a smile on her round, grey face.Mr. Tailor was a thin, tall man. He wore black pants and a green coat on all days. He collected clothes from every house in the town, and stiched little frocks and knickers and shirts and suits for children.He collected little pieces of the leftover material, and was stitching them all together to make a great , multi coloured coat for Phora. He loved Phora. He always kept a banana…

The highest amount of drama is created by people between the ages of 18 and 22. I'm 24 now and I suddenly feel displaced and dethroned. I was so caught up in my theatrical life , riding on a wave of high-drama and emotional excesses that I didn't realise I was about to be thrown off, that the kids of yesterday were right behind me , waiting to shove me down, step on my back, and ride high on what had been my wave.

It took a long time to see that I was no longer in the 'it' generation, the 'in' generation. That, I and my friends and my cousins, and everyone my age had been deposited on an obscure island. Here we sit, staring through our big, disillusioned eyes, at the 'kids' --- younger siblings, riff-raff from our housing societies, baby-cousins. This is a whole different generation, a generation we had always looked down upon, a generation we elbowed aside, a generation we read stories to, a generation we gave rides on our bikes to, a generation who …

My dad is a Homeopathician. I don't mean he has a BHMS. Actually, you didn't need a degree to be a Homeopathician when it had intially started out. So, my dad doesn't have a degree in it, but I'll bet my bottom paisa that he knows more about Homeo meds than all the kids graduating in it in these days.
Since I was six months old, he has been treating me with these meds. We never went to doctors, not even for stuff like jaundice, and typhoid. My dad treated us - I, my brother, my mum, my uncles, my aunts, my cousins. And, We never went to a homeo doctor, it's always been my dad who dispensed the meds.
He gets all the medicine from this place in Calcutta , puts them into sugar pills and puts them into those little,glass bottles, and we use them. Of course, he also buys the ready-made , little bottles (drams, they are measured in) from Zorastrian,Mumbai and, Ramakrishna,Hyderabad.

Now, I'm a pill-popper. I have a very low suffering threshold, and I need my quick-tr…

I've been sick the last 7 days. It was one thing after another. Firstly, I came down with food-poisoning, which basically meant I camped out in the restroom and kept throwing up till I was turned inside out. And, it has to be said, short hair comes in handy. When you have long, lovely hair (which I did for twenty years. Lol modesty.) , barfing becomes a two person activity; there is one person to hold your hair, and then, there is you, throwing up and befouling the other person's ears with your delightful language. And,you must know this, it is the liver. I assure you. People, for centuries, have blamed the stomach and the stomach lining and the intestines. But I'm convinced they were all lies concocted to throw us off. It is the liver, my friend. The liver which says, "Aha! Eff you." , and you are clutching the pot like a piece of life saving flotsam junk for the next four days. I know this, cause I always call my doctor after 36 hours of vomiting, and I go, &qu…

So, a few months back... I was scribbling in Sanvee's Colouring Book. And it suddenly hit me that everything I'd written was crappy... There's an awesome effing song to say all this .. I'm not sure where I was going with it , a poem of some kind I can only presume... but, the song , the song says everything !

What I scribbled -- I never thought that one day I would have to write such a letter,
begging the one I love – and who's quit loving me, – to give our love
another chance, for I could never imagine that something so big,
strong and bright could ever need such a thing. But, unfortunately, we
have reached a point where our small differences, our different points
of view overcame our feelings, turning all the love we feel for each
other into dust overnight! ,[well, actually its only on your part,
mine's intact]
Let’s forget the nasty details, let’s concentrate our strength in the
good things, such as this longing to be there for each other, all this
affection…

My ideas have been very limited by the environment I grew up in, which let's face it has been far less than ideal.
Like, in my mind, so far, work has always been divided into male work and female work, and I was always biased against female work cause I was taught that it was inferior. I'd decided outdoor-sy work into male work and indoor-sy work into female work; which is why I always fought with everyone saying I didn't want to cook, clean, wash and stuff.

Last month I went to Guruji's place and stayed for a couple of days. Imagine. My cousin's been engaged for almost a year and I went now. If I had gone there a couple of months back, it would have afforded me a lot of peace of mind and I'd have been proud of what I learnt and the mature ideas I adopted.

So, I was there ; the whole house and the temples and the ashram are all one big entity. They aren't separately located. And almost 400 people come over for lunch every weekend. So there I was servin…

Sundays have always been depressing. Since, I was about seven years old I dreaded Sundays. I know children love Sundays. A school holiday. We got to sleep in late and play all day long. But, I've always been a creature of habit, and to me no school, no friends, no 5-6 Disney hour, not staying alone with mum till 1900 (when dad came back from work), not meeting my bus friends - made me feel out of place, anxious and a wee bit sad. I liked my life the way it was, I liked the routine. It was weird to have my dad at home the whole day (this meant I had to speak softly, and behave myself and stay in fear of a silent,disapproving look all day along). It was weird to have no homework to do (I finished it on Saturday evening) , it was weird to have no where to go to, to have nothing to watch and nothing to do. We lived in a lonely house on a lonely street, and there were no kids to play with. This continued into my teenage. I was a loner,and never really had any friends to hang out with…

I am making this post because it feels mean to only blog about the bad experiences and leave out the good ones.
I picked another doctor today and took an appointment at her clinic for 1830. I got there at 1800, played with this really sweet , little girl who was sitting next to me for half an hour. This waiting room had fans , coolers, ACs, everything. I had walked in feeling dizzy and nauseous and in a really foul mood (the things summer heat does to you, 46 degrees) . After I had cooled off a little, I was ushered in to meet the doctor, an elderly woman with a sweet smile, and a patient hand. I poured forth all my agonies to her. Told her about everything from the little finger nail that hurt to maiming migraines. And , surprise, surprise -- she actually understood. She heard me out, explained why I was feeling the way I was feeling, described what lifestyle changes needed to be made, wrote a prescription for stemming the crippling pain, told me that the pills would make me feel hu…

I spent the entire day, yesterday, sitting in a doctor's waiting room. I had an appointment for 14.30 , and I was there from 1400 to 1700, and her highness was still too busy to attend to her punctual patients. I tried to find out what was keeping her, but the head nurse just kept telling me that she was tied up with patients, earlier appointments,lunch,phone consultations,visiting relatives and she would see me in 15 minutes ( and I thought my math was bad).
This waiting room did not have a fan because a fan is not fancy enough for their uber classy clinic. They had two air conditioners ( Bluestar, the nurse thought it pertinent to point out when I complained about the heat), neither of which was working. So, here we were , about 60 people cooped up in a hall with no air at 45 degrees.
I had dragged myself to the doctor for a pain problem, and I was forced to pop half a dozen painkillers 10 feet from the doctor to keep from screaming out in agony. I'm sure there were a lot …

I have always refused to blog . I am a very emotional, impulsive, open person with a very lowered sense of discretion, and I'm afraid I will write about personal things , about my honest opinions of things and will land myself in a truckload of trouble.
But , these days I find myself incredibly bored and for the lack of a better occupation ( actually, from the lack of a will to be productively occupied) , I've decided to throw caution to winds and blog. I could create a fake account and write under a psudonym and avoid being ostracised from society but I'm stupid that way, I like attention.

These past few days have been rough. PMS thinks I'm its experiment field where it can develop ever more lethal weapons to destroy unsuspecting victims. Thanks to its immense love for me, I get its first, intense blast. For the last ten years, I've tried hard to raise awareness about this condition that people treat lightly and even humoursly. Let me assure you that its…